One of the most exciting parts of the fall season is hearing Oscar buzz for a new film whenever it premieres at Venice or Telluride, and then finally getting a first glimpse when it releases a trailer for the rest of us a few days later. That always-exhilarating process just happened with RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys, which immediately entered the conversation upon its premiere at Telluride earlier this week.
Adapted from Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel of the same name, Nickel Boys "chronicles the powerful friendship between two young Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida," per the film's official logline. While Nickel Boys Academy is a fictional place, the story is inspired by the horrific abuse perpetrated against Black students at the very real Dozier School For Boys, an institution that operated during the 1950s and 1960s in Florida—the height of the Jim Crow era south.
Starring Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (who turns in what Tomris Laffly calls "a truly stunning performance" in her review of the film for The A.V. Club), Nickel Boys is a narrative film seen through a documentarian's eye. Known for his Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross takes on a similar project in Nickel Boys, which uses first-person close-ups and long takes to alternate between the POVs of its central characters.
"In a way, Nickel Boys is an extension and expansion of that effort to create a truthful archive where Black people tell their own story, in the past and present, and into the future," Laffly writes. "It’s a rewarding effort at that, a defiantly unconventional art film that challenges our notions of what cinema is and should be."
Nickel Boys premieres in theaters October 25.
